Sunday, 25 December 2016

Pigs in Duvets

Pigs in blankets are pretty special, right? What's not to love about mini sausages wrapped in bacon, aka "pigs in blankets". I'll tell you what - pigs in duvets. And not just pigs in duvets, pigs in duvets snuggled up with a cranberry sauce hot water bottle.

I had a lightbulb moment when I was dreaming back to last Christmas. We had some leftover pigs in blankets (what kind of monsters are we to have leftovers?!) and I made sandwiches with them and they were the best thing my tastebuds experienced that Christmas. Honestly, give it a go! Anyway, I was thinking about pig in blanket sammies and then I was also thinking about sausage rolls and then thought how amazing it would be to combine the two.

It took me a little while to get the balance of baking right - first attempt ended with overdone pastry and underdone sausages but the second attempt was spot on. I admit now that I cheated completely as I not only used shop bought pastry but had pre-bacon wrapped chipolatas...if you're making these for yourself I think you'd probably be much better than me and have your own excellent recipe for flaky pastry and would actually be bothered to do that oh so difficult task of wrapping mini sausages with strips of bacon...

Cut the bacon strips in half and wrap once around the chipolatas. I found that part-baking the chipolatas made sure that they were fully cooked after being wrapped in pastry without the pastry over-baking so baked them for about 10 minutes in a fan oven that was preheated to 200C.

While the piggies are baking, slice strips of the pastry (rolled to about 1 1/2mm thick) to the width of the sausages and long enough to wrap around the sausages once.

Spoon a little cranberry sauce in the middle of the pastry strips and once the sausages have been part baked, wrap them up in the pastry and return to the oven for around another 10 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown.

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